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Later on, she would try to remember how they had become best friends. Justifying it to herself and others grew harder with each passing year, so she stopped. To the friends she made during their school years, it was virtually incomprehensible. They couldn’t understand because she was supposed to be better than that.
(Him)
He was selfish, petty, vengeful, and cruel. He hurt people and associated himself with the worst crowd, and, for that, he was also a coward.
Lily couldn’t disagree with her friends—the ones she made after arriving at Hogwarts—when they talked about Severus.
They weren’t wrong, not completely. Severus embodied the traits she most despised: he was weak, envious of others, and believed himself superior to everyone else. He couldn’t tolerate mediocrity and thought such people didn’t deserve to be happy. He was a bad person and a terrible friend.
But he was her first, and for a while, her only ally.
Perhaps it was because he didn’t see her as a freak. After all, growing up, that’s what Petunia called her. Perhaps it was because he understood Lily at the start and saw something in her that others overlooked—something people feared, beyond her magic. He said they were alike.
(!)
It was the first time she had heard anything like it, and it instantly made her feel part of something meaningful.
(A friendship, a place, and a time when they existed only for each other.)
The second time he said it, it sounded like a test—one she failed by refusing to accept it as truth.
Her friends would tell her he was manipulative and delusional to think two people so different could share anything in common, but Lily knew better. She pretended better. And that’s what Severus meant, wasn’t it? That she, like him, had learnt to adapt. Houses separated them at eleven, and ideologies divided them when she was old enough to understand what it meant to be pure, half, or mud.
It wasn’t as though she was unaware. During the first two years at school, it was easier to let that be a problem for the future. She focused on being a talented student, a good friend, and excelling in everything presented to her. The compliments numbed the pain left by the rift between her and Petunia. Severus used to tell her it was better that way—she was a witch, and her sister wouldn’t understand what that meant. It was easier to let go now, while they were both young, rather than later in life, when it would hurt more.
It never stopped hurting.
The pain turned into rage and, sometimes, jealousy. In her final moments, she wondered: when had she started thinking of her life before Hogwarts as separate from the life she carved out for herself there? How was she fighting for the right side when she had let go of everything that made her Muggle-born so many years ago?
She felt like a fraud, and for that, she hated Severus.
Instead, she blamed herself for accepting his friendship and excusing his behaviour in those early years. It wasn’t as though James and his friends were better people, after all. The guilt, shame, and hurt blurred together so completely that even Lily struggled to recognise that, in the beginning, it was loneliness that led her to find in another person the love she craved from her sister. It was Severus’s loyalty to Lily—the scared, lonely Lily—that made her so willing to overlook the awful things he stood for.
Lily hated James for so long, and no one understood why. It wasn’t his arrogance or his inability to take no for an answer. It wasn’t even his way of moving through life as if it were a performance with him as the main character, all eyes on him—larger than life itself.
His friends weren’t always kind to others, especially not to those they deemed unworthy. But what Lily hated most was the way they had each other’s backs, even when tensions simmered between them.
Her heart had never softened over the years, and she hated with the same intensity she felt for everything else. Yes, she was good, but it was foolish to think a heart couldn’t hold both truths.
Lily hated Severus and couldn’t let go of him, and she hated herself for that, too. When she finally did let go, she felt even more ashamed. Because it was selfish, truly. It was about her and what he had done to her. In a way, it was both the final straw and an excuse for someone tired of making excuses. So, she hated James because he never abandoned his friends as she had. For that, she thought herself a coward. She had tried to tread a middle ground in her friendship, much like Severus approached life—never committing to anything but survival. A poor excuse for a Death Eater and a poor excuse for a friend.
The horrible truth about not living past her twenties was that Lily never granted herself the forgiveness she deserved.
If she had had more time, she might have realised her rage came from a place of love—a hatred of the injustice of a system that forced people like her to choose one life over another. It made her fine with discarding her old ways to embrace her true self. But how true could it have been if she wasn’t allowed to share it with her sister, her parents, and everything that came before? How grand was that magic when it demanded she give up the very things that had made her an eleven-year-old brave enough to be a Gryffindor? That rage was a passion for a life that could—and should—have been more than what she got.
And perhaps, had she forgiven herself, she would have understood that Severus was the last thing she held onto from her old life. The life stripped from her the moment she boarded the Hogwarts Express. Why wasn’t she allowed to have at least that, after everything else had been taken? If she could have had him as he was—a child, just as amazed and equally afraid of magic as she was—then perhaps it would have meant something. If he could change, perhaps Petunia could, too.
One day.
(She never had one day.)
It’s funny, in a way that’s entirely tragic, ironic, and heart-wrenching, that James’s loyalty got them killed, while hers gave them a chance to fight back, even as everything fell apart. Life truly had no meaning beyond what you gave it, and Lily understood that, if only for a second, before it all faded.
You know that it's gonna take time don't ya?
You know that you never were right
But the fact is you're good
Yeah, we know that you're nice
But we don't get a world and we don't get a life